Combatting Spiritual and Social Bondage : early missions in the Cape Colony

Abstract

l ttt 1792, and the putatively interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1795, 5 wcre both revivalist in emphasis.Other missionaries, from a different tradition or period, had other aims.In genera], until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1 815, Anglican conservatives distmsted evangelical "enthusiasm" and ecclesiastical "irregularity" too much to sanction overseas mission work; despite the tentative early efforts of the fledgling Anglican evangelicai Church Missionary Society, the carliest missionaries were thus dissenters, disbarred in England until 1828 from füll political participation and attracted to militant and radical tendencies in Protestantism.As missionary activity became more widely accepted and admission Standards tightened, missionaries tended to be of higher social class, better educau-d, and more likcly to value social and ecclesiastical order.6 The first British missionaries were most often members of the upper working classes, especially in newly industrializing areas where the power of the Anglican Church was weak; but since missionaries needed a measure of literacy, they were ncvcr drawn from the ranks of the completely destitute.They tended to believe in aggressive self-improvement and the need to subjugate nature to human will.Often coming from recently rural areas made richer by a degree of industrialization and not yet devastated, they had a relatively benign view of industrialization.Indeed, in line with popularized precepts of the Scottish Enlightenment, many, like the Rev. Ad.mi Ferguson, professor of philosophy in Edinburgh, tended to see the development of "commercial society" as integral to all progress.7 l'he missions of Continental Europe had a different social, political and theologic.ilbackground.With key exceptions like H. Marsveld (a Dutchman) and H.P. l lallbcck (d Swecle), most Moravians, who had preceded British missionaries to the Cape and re-established their mission in 1792, were born in the villages of Saxony, and remained members of the European Moravian communities.Most rcceived their bricles from thcre and sent their children to Europe for education, never building up kinship links in the Cape, either with whites or with Coloureds.T'rained as artisans, they introduced craft production to Moravian mission stations, creating in South Africa central European villages, on a model probably never realized in the villages they had left.8 A few Dutch men (and women) had joined the LMS in its early years, but the mission work of the German and Huguenot churches did not begin until aftcr the Napoleonic wars.While the French Protestant mission was primarily an Imitation of British developments in minority churches, 9 German missionary societies eniergcd from a second wave of Pietism, a reaction to the secularizing modernism of the Erench Revolution, and were, as a result, politically acceptable to the establishment.The Prussian monarchy itlentified itself closely with the Berlin Missionary Society. 10 The principal hackers of the Rhenish society, which was to work in the Cape and the future Namibia, did not come from the artisans and the "respectable" working class, as would have been the case in Britain, but rather from the local elite of factory owners and merchants in the Wupper valley north of Cologne, 1 ' although its missionaries came from a much wider area.12 l hc Religions <>/ the Dispossessed: Khoisan and Slai'es l hè first work by European missionary societies in South Africa was among the Khoikhoi, then known by whites äs "Hottentots" -a formerly stock-herding people who inhabited most of the region later absorbed in the Cape Colony -and among the San, then called "Bushmen," a group closely related to the'Khöikhoi but normally without cattle or sheep.The German-speaking butcher Georg Schmidt had begun work for the Moravians in 1737 among the Hessequa Khoikhoi of the Overberg region of the western Cape, then a centre of Khoikhoi settlement, now the village of Genadendal.13 One of his earliest converts, Vehettge Tikkuie, recalled fifty years later that, in Schmidt's day, "the people had not been as poor as they were now."They had been numerous, and had had "plenty of cattle" and "more than enough meat and milk."14 The VOC authorities forced Schmidt to abandon his work in 1743, as a result of pressure from the Dutch Reformed clergy (see pp.28-29).By 1792, when the Moravians restored the mission, the Khoikhoi of the arca had few cattle and were compelled to rely on farmwork for subsistence.Their last attempt at revolt occurred in the 1790s.15 In the eastern Cape the mostly Gonaqua Khoikhoi tried in vain to resist dispossession.In a three-year rebellion from 1799 to 1802, they suffered large-scale loss of stock, land, and access to water, and were increasingly reduced to servitude to local white farmers.16 The Community structures of the Khoikhoi across the colony had been profoundly weakened before they came into contact with missionaries.The fluid religiosity of Khoikhoi was able to absorb symbols from other cultures.Different groups used different but related terms for divinities.The nineteenth-century Nama worshipped a supreme being known as Tsuni-//goam, who could be approached through prayer and was possibly benevolent.Evil forces were concentrated in an evil deity, named Gaunab, whose centrality, however, may have grown after contact with Christian ideas of Satan.Mythic figures, such as the ancestral hero Heitsi-eibib, operatcd in the secular realm but reflected the nature of cither Tsuni-//goam or Gaunab.17 Sacred dancing was central to worship, the Khoikhoi dancing at night, especially before a füll moon, to the accompaniment of sacred songs.Christian converts abandoned dancing at night, and refused to sing Khoikhoi songs, but often substituted all-night religious meetings and Christian hymns.In Khoisan culture there were healing rituals, initiation rites for boys and girls, and a range of taboo beliefs and purification practices.Animals occupied an important place.An elderly man interviewed by Moravian missionaries in 1808 told them that all members of his Community had a particular link with the spirit world in the shape of an unearthly animal that followed them thoughout life and brought news in times of crisis.18 Snakes were considered to cause illness and misfortune, and healcrs who had undergone special training, were thought able to eure the bodu's of sufferers.Storytelling bound together myth, heroic narrative, and the ordinary: the heroes of Khoisan folktales were not powerful figures, but often tricksters who escaped danger through cunning.Many Khoisan tales were about animals.Dreams were a crucial means of communication between human and sacred beings: tlicy were considered prophetic, and their interpretation a matter of common convcrsation.Prophetic figures with particular powers to know things and to affect i-vcnts could come to the fore, notably in the rebellions in both the eastern and western Cape just before the missionaries' arrival, 19 and adherence to war prophets l

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